I have acquired myself a role at a shoot on weekends. The shoot is organised throughout each shoot day via handheld radios.

Shoot operations/management use a bunch of Mitex 5w VHF handies.

The gamekeepers, quad bikes, the shooters, and everyone on foot are organised via lots of PMR446 handies.

Everyone uses their own gear, so everyone has their own 446 radio.

My job requires me to be able to hear both Operations comms and 446 comms. So far I have got round this by digging out an old Uniden 3500XLT scanner I had in a drawer and programming in the 446 channel and the UHF frequently, and this worked fine as I could hear both sets of chatter throughout the day

However it is become apparent that I will now be required to occasionally reply to someone on 446 rather than just listen all day.

The other people in my position have both a PMR446 and a UHF hanging round their necks, however rather than buying one of each of these, I'm looking for a neater and more professional solution.

So.. can anyone recommend a decent handheld that will be able to monitor a 446 and a VHF channel at the same time all day, and be able to TX to either (as selected).

I have no problems with buying a Chinese radio or anything like that.

It would be preferable if the radio would be able to monitor UHF + VHF, or UHF + UHF, or VHF + VHF... you get the idea, as shoot comms may change as they sometimes lose or break a load of radios and might just go out and buy a box of 10 UHF's to replace the current VHF's etc.

Hi
My mate does the same as regards shoots and he uses a BAOFENG UV-5R

Hi, that's good to know cheers.

I will have a look at that UV-5R.

Do you know how easy it is to pick which of the Dual frequencies to TX on? Might have to be able to reply on either of them.

Edited to add: I've just watched a video on the UV-5R and it appears that when you press TX it does it automatically on the channel that last received an incoming signal, which I can see would be very handy for replying to things.

You'll need full duplex receive to do what you need, most radios only do simplex or semi-duplex (pri ch). The Puxing UV-973 will do full duplex but don't seem so easy to find nowadays. There is this though, Professional Radio PR-UV88, which is a rebadged version. I have two and they're quite good imho. Does cross band repeat and has a scrambler too. You can listen to two channels at once of course, V-V, U-U, V-U, U-V etc. and press the A/B button to pick TX vfo.

I am happy to be corrected, but it appears that radio listens to both channels at once and switches to whichever begins to receive a signal, and then hovers on that channel until it hears the other channel, and then switches to that.

If you TX, then it TX's on the channel that last received something.

All that seems to make perfect sense to me. You are most likely to need to TX and reply to someone on the channel that you last received.

You can also press a button and switch between the two channels before you TX.

If I have understood correctly, then the radio is absolutely perfect for what I want, but as I said, I'm happy to be corrected if I have misunderstood the videos that I watched.

Bit confused that when I TX with it and listen to the audio on my scanner, it appears to 'pulse'.

You can hear audio from the Baofeng for two seconds then it goes off, then comes back for two seconds, then goes off, and just repeats this.

Not sure if it's a scanner issue or a duff radio!

There is nothing on the Baofeng to suggest that it's a problem, the TX light and signal strength stay solid the whole time, but when you listen via the scanner it is like you are keying and releasing the TX button constantly while you are speaking.